Born in Bad Kudowa, Lower Silesia, then Poland, to a Jewish family, Jan Koplowitz supported a strike of spa employees at the age of 16, and was then expelled from his middle-class parents\u2019 home.\u00a0In 1923, he moved to Breslau and, in 1928, joined the communist movement, wrote for workers’ newspapers and joined the\u00a0Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1928, essentially by\u00a0the KPD.\u00a0 In 1931, he became editor of the Breslauer Arbeiterzeitung and head of the agitprop group \u201cRoter Kn\u00fcppel\u201d, whose texts he also wrote.<\/p>\n
An activist who had already been arrested a couple of times, in February 1933 he broke a SA\u2019s skull.\u00a0Imprisoned, he managed to escape but was then had to go underground. He began\u00a0illegal\u00a0work for the KPD\u00a0in northern Bohemia (or the Sudenland), including \u2018border work\u2019. He became an illegal party organiser in 1938 after the KPD leadership had fled. He too soon fled, arriving in the UK in 1939 via Poland, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, post Munich Agreement.<\/p>\n
He was interned at Huyton Camp in 1940;1<\/sup><\/a> afterwards, he worked for the Free League of German Culture and in its amateur theatre subgroups. (He also apparently at one point got a job as a butler.) He then left in 1945 for what would become E. Berlin where he became active in amateur theatre groups and became a prolific writer.<\/p>\n Elfriede Br\u00fcning, a well-known East German writer and member of the KPD from the 1930s later wrote about him: \u201cWe younger people were standing at the beginning of our literary development, which Hitler suddenly interrupted. Some never got over the shock. … Others had to start all over again after 1945. 2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n